ACP Planner - priority and monitor interval

[Tom Krajci]

For some of my observing projects I use Planner to import from TheSky Data Wizard...which is just a comma delimited file of the correct format.

A dialog box opens before you get to the actual targets in Planner. In it you can set the minimum elevation constraint...to apply to all plans.

I then save my imported plan as an rtml file.

In a future release of Planner, is it possible to also include the ability to specify a priority and monitor interval that can be applied to all plans being imported? (I know, that applies to ACP Scheduler use...and probably little else.)

Thanks in advance.

[Bob Denny]

Zooming out from this, I see a need to import target lists into Scheduler, with the ability to select exposure times, binning, filters, and any of its constraints and/or other features to be applied in common to all of the targets in the list. Do I have that right?

Planner is really designed for the scenario where you specify the time at which you want observations to be taken. Since scheduler's benefit is that it chooses the time based on your requirements, Planner is sort of a "square peg in a round hole" solution.

The tool you are looking for would be for the specific use of getting lists of things to monitor into Scheduler, for example, the Bright Star Monitor. I'm not convinced (yet) that this would be beneficial for more than a tiny group of customers. To make it more useful it would need to be more general, but even then I don't see wide use for it.

Special applications such as yours are thus best handled by using scripting to build just the tool you need for your use. That is part of my vision for ACP and Scheduler -- to allow an infinite variety of specific applications to be supported, in addition to the "one size fits all" features that I've also included. I could envision a drag-and-drop script for this. Make the target list using TheSky or whatever, then drop that file onto the script icon, resulting in an RTML file for import into Scheduler. This is what most of the other heavy duty science customers of Scheduler are doing.

I'm happy to assist in structuring such a script, pointing you or someone else at AAVSO to the tools, objects, and other things that are part of Scheduler in order to simplify the script writing. For example, I've included a component that makes it really easy to construct the RTML (XML) without writing angle brackets and tags, instead creating objects and setting their properties, then when all done, the conversion to RTML is done for you. I'm also happy to write up script snippets as examples to help.

If you want to talk about this by phone, please give me a call at 480 396 9700 during business hours UTC-7. I can also talk to Arne Henden and/or the guy there (I forget his name) that has done some of this in the past.